Do Better! Be Better! You Don’t Have To. YOU GET TO!

By Mark D. Estes

Good for you for looking at this book and thinking about doing better and being better! You have made it this far in life and have a lot more you can achieve. You have tremendous abilities to make things happen, achieve greatness, benefit society, and to be happy! But how can you get to that point?
Do Better! Be Better! is a compilation of valuable lessons from business titans, successful billionaires, hall-of-fame athletes, books, courses, and research about how to improve your life and get more of what you want. This book contains a wealth of information, wisdom, and insights that you can use to achieve greatness, be happy, and surpass your wildest dreams. Additionally, my book contains goal-setting worksheets and chapter questions to help place you on the right track to personal growth.
Ultimately, Do Better Be Better! will help you learn how to improve yourself and maximize your true potential. Remember, YOU are the master of your own destiny. With enough desire, direction, strategies, and motivational tools, you'll achieve the results and success you've always been looking for.
What do you want?
How can you get it?
Find the Secret to Happiness!
Learn to cope with anything!
Come. Read this transformational book. DO BETTER! And BE BETTER!

• Language: English
• Publisher: eBooks2go, Inc.
• Release date: Jul 3, 2023
• ISBN: 9781545756645

Book preview

Introduction

Why do you want to do better?

What do you want?

Don’t be afraid to dream big!

You can do better!

Want it, work for it, get it!

Good for you for looking at this book and thinking about doing better and being better! You have made it this far in life and have a lot more you can achieve. You have tremendous abilities to make things happen, achieve greatness, benefit society, and to be happy! This book exists for your benefit. These pages contain knowledge, skills, tactics, insights from hundreds of people, lifetimes of learning, and wisdom gained from countless lessons learned from failures by others—all for you. You can build on the wisdom from others and be an enormous success! All it takes on your part is desire, defining what you want and when you want it, time, effort, and a willingness to make mistakes and learn from them. Success does not mean all hard work, then reward. It is a wonderful process and journey from where you are to where you want to be. Getting there includes a lot of hard work, but it is meaningful work with a purpose toward dreams and goals. Your dreams, goals, and desires are all within your control. I promise you that you will learn some new things, be reminded of some things you already know, and be able to do better and be better! How much better depends on how much you want.

This book contains information collected to help you be inspired to want to do better, help you to be motivated for you to take the steps to be better, and provide you some of the tools available to help you do better and be better. I am no more special or greater than you. I have spent a large part of my life trying to do better, learning from successful people, listening to audio programs on doing better, attending seminars, and reading books about doing better and learning from trial and error. I envision you finding some insights and inspiration from this book to make a positive change to your own life. As part of that positive change, I hope you share insights from the book, and the book itself, with others.

I apologize if some of my stories or examples might not all resonate with you, but I hope that some do. I have read books in which the authors spend a lot of time glorifying themselves and/or go on about a bunch of extraneous personal information. I, on the other hand, tend to be too blunt at times. Somewhere in between there is a reasonable balance that I hope I have portrayed in this book and that it works for you. My wife, Evelyn, has been my major inspiration for trying to do better and be better. She deserves the very best I can be, and I am proud to have made some progress doing better with her as my inspiration. She is my muse, my best friend, my soul mate, and a large part of my reason for wanting to do better and be better. Even though I am blessed with having my muse, it has taken me decades to getting around to writing this book and to making some significant progress on some of my other goals. Parts of this book will likely seem a little over the top with positive, hopeful, upbeat, and encouraging messages. While you have likely heard some of this before, I expect there is still more and better that you want to accomplish that you haven’t for some reason been able to do. Maybe if I had read the right book decades ago I would have been inspired to get more of my goals accomplished earlier in life. I hope you will find some inspiration, motivation, and wisdom that helps you do better and be better, or at least do so faster!

What are your reasons to do better? Do you have children who deserve you at your best? A spouse, significant other, friend, or someone else who makes you want to do better and be better? With whom will you share your stellar success when you decide to achieve it? How about you? Don’t you deserve the best from the world around you and from you yourself? You have a greatness in you and can accomplish wonderous things! You are so unique that you are the only one, for better or worse, who can really change you. While that can seem somewhat scary and a huge responsibility for you, it is awesome that you alone have control over you! You have the wonderful power to shape your future by creating ideas, making decisions, and doing things!

Whoever or whatever it takes, embrace the inspiration and motivation that fans the spark of greatness in you to the level of a smoldering ember, then a long-lasting flame of continued greatness. Warm those around you, and be a light for others. The good news is that you don’t have to wait for someone else to try to change you, to give you desire and a will to succeed. You have all that within you. Find your inspirations to bring them to the surface and make them real. Continuously feed your inspiration, especially in times of difficulty, when it is needed most. Learn and use tools to continue making progress, even when your short-term motivation fades.

People have been doing great things for thousands of years and learning lessons sometimes at high personal cost. While there has never been and will never be another you, with your dreams, hopes, abilities, and challenges, people have been facing the same adversity for a long time. Today there is so much easy access to information and platforms to connect with others. You can learn about the lives, efforts, success, failures, and lessons learned from great people who have done similar things to what you want to do. You don’t have to search through hundreds of books and thousands of pages at the library. You don’t have to spend twenty years interviewing people. All you have to do is type, point, click, or just say what you want to learn from the internet. Ralph Waldo Emerson ¹ wrote, back in the 1800s, about a collective consciousness that is a universal mind from which an individual can understand all that is or can be done. In his book Think and Grow Rich, from the 1930s, Napoleon Hill² mentions an infinite intelligence that we can tap into by visualizing our goals and having strong desires to achieve them. I don’t want to trivialize either man’s great philosophical theories, but don’t we have that now with the internet? Moreover, aren’t we today pretty much all connected with cell phones, computers, email, social media, TV, and radio?

Isn’t this a magical time in which we live! You have access to more ideas, support, knowledge, wisdom, opportunities, and tools to achieve them than in any time in our history. Many of these tools have come into being only in the last couple of decades. How will you take advantage of all this wonderous new technology and connectivity? What do you want? Based on all my research and experience, the most important factor for success is a strong desire. Without it, there is no inspiration, motivation, or driving force to make things happen. I don’t know you. I don’t know what you want or what sparks your soul. If you can find a dream, desire, or heart song and work hard for it, good for you. Let the world watch out, because nothing will keep you from your success!

Not only after your success will you be able to help others with their needs, wants, and dreams, if you so choose, but also during your process of becoming successful by meeting others’ needs. The better you provide goods, services, and benefits for others, the better you are compensated. The better you are compensated, the more you can address your needs, wants, and dreams. A few times in this book, I make references to engineering, physics, or science, partly because of my engineering education and partly because there are certain laws or truths that apply both to scientific principles and general life principles. To start, the first law of thermodynamics regarding conservation of energy, loosely interpreted, states, You can’t get something for nothing. In terms of general life principles, You have to give a little to get a little. If you give a lot, you get a lot. In other words, the more people you provide benefit to, the more benefit you get. While another interpretation of the first law is that because energy is finite you have to take from others in order to gain because resources and wealth are limited, both of which I believe do not apply to life, well-being, goodness, mental energy, or happiness. You definitely don’t have to take anything from others in order to be happy! On the contrary, the happier you are, the happier you can help others be.

This book is laid out in order for you to do better and be better, starting with why, then what and when, then how, then doing even better. There is a section at the end with inspiration and wisdom quotes from notable people with a brief biography of each person. There is also an appendix of talents and gifts people have and a list of good deeds that might give you some ideas for how you can be better by doing good for the sake of good. You will see mentioned in this book that as you provide goods, services, and help to others, you succeed and are able to reach your goals and dreams. It is the way our world works. Taking from others in order to succeed lasts only so long, until the well runs dry, and there is nothing left to take. The real way to build yourself up is not to tear others down but with mutual benefit. The one you have the most control over is you. As you build your dreams, work toward your goals, and pursue your ambitions, you will undoubtedly be inspired and assisted by others. In kind, you can inspire and assist others.

As you make your way through this book, I suggest that you keep a notepad and pencil or pen nearby so you can take notes. You might want to remember or refer to some of the content, but more importantly you might want to write down your thoughts about why, what, or how you want to do things better and be better. There are also some lists and things suggested that you might want to write down. One way to make ideas, dreams, and goals more real is to write them down. I have included many references to songs in this book. Originally, I wanted to reprint the lyrics themselves but found that I cannot legally do so. We can find in songs inspiration and food for thought about life and wisdom to consider. They say that art imitates life, or is it the other way around?

I am excited for you, the opportunities that you have to do better and be better, and hope that this book will help you. I wish that in my youth I had the knowledge and wisdom I have learned from life and from others that I have now and shared with you in this book. Unfortunately, the only way we learn is from personal experience and from the experiences of others in person or from the books containing their knowledge and wisdom. If you decide to do better and be better, you are already on track to do so. I hope this book gives you some inspiration, motivation, tools, and tactics to help you in your efforts. You have awesome potential! You can do as much better as you want to. The knowledge and wisdom of the ages is at your fingertips! It is all up to you!

Why Do or Be Better?

If you shoot for the stars and settle for the moon, you still made it pretty far!

Ancient proverb: the best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago; the next best time is today.

You are never too old to change, learn, or succeed!

You are the master of your own destiny!

It is with righteous indignation that I vow to make up for my lack of success to date by getting better and doubling my efforts to succeed.

The driving force behind you doing better is your desire to do so. If you don’t already have a strong desire to do better, or want a potential reminder why you want to do and be better, you can review the items listed later in this chapter, which might trigger or reinforce some inspiration or motivation for you. Don’t be shy about it. Don’t judge whether you can accomplish it, it looks too hard, or you don’t deserve it. Just pick a dream or two and let yourself imagine attaining what you want. Let yourself desire something better than you have now. Don’t let fear of failure, feeling unworthy, or lack of faith in yourself keep you from wanting and desire to do better and have more.

I have been guilty of not pursuing my dreams because of fear and a lack of desire. I had let my desire remain stifled, at times feeling unworthy of success. I don’t know. Maybe thousands of times I have gone to bed thinking: I will get up early tomorrow and start working on goals, then feel defeated for not doing so. Inspiration can be fleeting. Motivation can be fragile. In this book, you will find tools to keep you moving forward, including maintaining a positive attitude, defining what you want, writing things down, documenting steps to take, doing the right things, dealing better with crises, dealing better with people, and learning from others. Your foundation to learn, keep moving forward, and do better for yourself, especially in the face of hardships and setbacks, is your desire, your belief in yourself, and your hope for better outcomes. Even when you aren’t thinking of your desire, your belief in yourself is low, and your hope seems to be fading, there are tools and tactics to keep you moving. To get started, why do you want to do better?

How many times have you thought about:

Some celebrity or other apparently successful person and said to yourself, Why does that person seem to have it all?

The next-door neighbors with kids, a dog, a pool, and a garage, always looking perfect and happy

The kid you see driving the Porsche his parents gave him who speeds through a residential neighborhood

The professional athlete with his bright future and arrogant attitude

The coworker with half your skills doing better than you, who brags about how great he is

The times when you think back about all your hopes and dreams when you were young that are unfulfilled

The dreams that you still have but don’t know how to make happen

The end of the day, when you think, Is this all there is for me?

Someday I will … but never do

The things you want to do to do better but have been afraid to try or start

The things have you started in the past but never followed through

The short-term sting of past failures that blinded you to the lessons you learned from trying

The times when you feel you don’t deserve better; maybe you have done harm to others emotionally or otherwise; you feel angry or frustrated with where you are at in life and don’t know what to do but know that you want something

How you are excited at times about all the opportunities out there, but do not know where to start

That you are doing well, making lots of money, and have lots of things but feel hollow and without purpose sometimes

What you want to do as a career

Atoning for a lot of bad you have done

Why does life have to be so hard?

How you deserve better

Being on the precipice of greatness

It being time you started doing better

It is natural to at times to feel somewhat reluctant to have dreams and goals for fear of not reaching them, being disappointed, and/or otherwise failing. We can worry about what others might think of us if we fail. We can be worried that after putting in a lot of hard work we still don’t achieve what we wanted. The reality is that all the doubt and fear you can think of are based on fictitious maybes—they’re not real. Yes, you might have some setbacks from which you will learn. Yes, you might change course during pursuit of a dream, maybe even for a better dream. Yes, you will face some challenges for which you will become better in order to overcome. Most of all, yes, you will know that your efforts have meaning, and you should be proud of yourself for trying!

What would you do better if you could go back in time and do it again? Well, sorry that is not going to happen. The awesome thing is